I had a skeleton of this article written up before last night. I figured it would be a fairly simple thing to fill in a few details, double check some numbers, get some quotes and call it a day.
Less than 37 minutes into the Indie Games Night Market, there were still hundreds of folks in line just to get in.
Multiple games had already sold out.
So I scrapped that draft, and started over.
The Event
The Indie Games Night Market was “small” market event within PAX Unplugged, organized and hosted by Daniel Newman of New Mill Games. It was for games that would otherwise never go to production or distribution.
The reasons for that were as varied as the games themselves:
Propaganda is a game about tossing dice and then using photo framing to try and sell yourself as the underdog. The game’s core mechanic and unfortunately topical theming made it difficult for the designer, Chris Lawrence, to pitch it to publishers.
Lab Meltdown is a real time co-operative game with a lot of components. Designer Amelie Le-Roche, who assembles her games out of garage, said it would have been impractical for her to produce more copies than she needed for the Night Market.
In Memory Of is a collaborative storytelling experience about holding a funeral for fictional person. The designer, Tony Tran, felt like it would be too sad an experience for a mass market audience.
And some games, like Skyline, a 1-4 player co-op visual puzzle game, were never made to be distributed at all. Max Seidman and Mary Flanagan made Skyline as a research tool over 10 years ago, and the Night Market proved to be a solid opportunity to dust off and hand-craft a fun game that otherwise wouldn’t have been published.
This is just a smattering of games and reasons, but the Night Market let all of these designs, that might otherwise not have seen the light of day, have a chance to shine.
The Results
It’s hard to see this first event as anything but staggering success. There were over 20 games, and slightly under that many designers. There were some pain points, but both attendees and designers clearly had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the idea.
Folks had started lining up at 6:00 to get in, and by the time 7:00 rolled around, there were five or six stacks of lines filled. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the setup:
Games sold quickly. Different designers brought different numbers of games, so some games vanished in an instant, while other games held onto their demo copy to sell closer to the end of the night. While the event was planned to run until 10:00, things had mostly quieted down by about 9:30 or so.
Pain Points
No first draft is perfect, and the same can be said for events. While things went fairly smoothly for the designers, many attendees who waited in line found that all the games they were looking for had sold out by the time they got in.
In addition, the looping structure of the layout and the small corridors for each table meant that there was some bunching up near the front. This resolved itself eventually, but was definitely a bit of a problem at the start.
Overall
IGNM was a pretty incredible event. While I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone, it seemed like at least half the tables completely sold out. I’m super excited to see what the future holds for this sort of event.
That said I do feel quite bad for folks on the tail end of the line to get in. Some of these attendees waited 45 minutes to walk into a mostly empty salesfloor.
The designers I was able to talk to were thrilled with the response to their games. Even the folks who had expected to sell all their copies didn’t expect this level of turnout.
While I obviously wasn’t able to look at everything, the full list of games and designers can be found here.
Post-Scripts
- There’s a lot that could be said about Japanese indie culture as it relates to fan work, small batch board games, and other differences between Japan and the US. And it should be said by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone like James Nathan, whose has a bunch of great posts about attending the Tokyo Game Market on Opinionated Gamers. (The one above is a really fascinating read about catalogs, and cultural expectations.)
- I had originally planned to play as many of the games at the event as I could, and buy a lot more. Since I managed to get into the event early to help folks set up, and to interview a few people, I scrapped that plan out of respect to attendees who had waited in line. I did manage to get copies of Propaganda, Mutation, and In Memory Of, which I’ll cover at some point in the future.
Thanks
I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who took time to chat with me about their games, and their thoughts on the night market, including, but not limited to:
- Daniel Newman of New Mill Games, for hosting the event, and chatting with me about his inspiration for it.
- Chris Lawrence, the designer of Propaganda
- Max Seidman, one of the designers of Skyline
- Tony Tran, the designer of In Memory Of
- The many, many, attendees who took the time to chat with me briefly about their feelings on the event.